Nonviolence by Mark Kurlansky Page A

oppose fighting was now equated with being a British loyalist. A loyalist in East Haddam, Connecticut, according to a loyalist report, was attacked by a mob for his politics. He was stripped of all his clothes, and pitch, so hot it burned his skin, was poured on him. He was then taken to a pigsty and had pig excrement rubbed on his body, thrown on his face, and forced down his throat. In Morristown, New Jersey, 105 men were sentenced to death for suspicion of being loyalists. Of them, 101 saved themselves by pledging loyalty to the revolutionary cause. The other four were hanged. Delaware sentenced a man accused of being a loyalist to be hanged and while still breathing cut down and drawn and quartered. Connecticut established the death penalty for loyalists, and in New York any statement deemed favorable to the loyalist cause was punishable by death. Even where it was not a capital crime, those who would not fight for the revolution were sometimes lynched, a practice named for Colonel Charles Lynch of Virginia, who would hang people by their limbs from a walnut tree in his yard until they screamed “Liberty forever!”
    Families were bitterly divided. Benjamin Franklin turned against his own son, William, because he was a loyalist, and he did nothing to help him when William was thrown in an infamous underground dungeon in 1776.
    After the outbreak of armed hostilities, the Pennsylvania Assembly fell largely into the hands of the revolutionaries, who required all white males of at least the age of eighteen to take an oath of “Renunciation and Allegiance.” Such oaths were forbidden by most pacifist religions, but those who refused the oath could be greatly harassed. If they traveled, upon arriving in a new town theycould be thrown in jail until they swore the oath. Those who did not take it were denied basic civil rights and sometimes imprisoned. Homes were confiscated from pacifists. More than most religious sects, the Quakers tried to enforce their beliefs, penalizing—even ejecting—members who in any way contributed to the war effort.
    But not all pacifists were religious. Some secular Americans simply refused the draft and were imprisoned until they agreed to take up the cause.
    The United States of America was founded by a war, and so it needed to be a “good war.” The creation of this founding myth, the rewriting of history, began immediately after the war, while everyone with short-term memory knew otherwise. Collective amnesia was a small further sacrifice for nation building.
    Most schoolchildren today are given the impression that the American Revolution was a relatively benign war. The worst thing that happened outside of the Continental Army being cold in the winter was the hanging of Nathan Hale, before which he got to make a speech asserting his willingness to be hanged.
    In truth, the American Revolution was a brutal civil conflict filled with not only combat casualties but bitter feuds and abuses between civilians and between military and civilians. A higher percentage of the American population died in the Revolution than in any other war in U.S. history except the undeniably brutal Civil War. The Revolution, like most civil wars, was a war against civilians, a war in which women and children and the homes in which they lived were often deliberately and viciously targeted. Civilians would run in terror at the approach of either army. Homes were sacked and women were raped.
    Saints were created and called “the Founding Fathers” but the Founding Fathers knew that such idolatry—Thomas Jefferson called it “sanctimonious reverence”—would harm the republic. They were far from the most progressive thinkers of the day. Slavery was their most celebrated flaw but they also set the stage for the genocide of some ten million American Indians, nor did they even entirely reject colonialism. They believed it was wrong to taxcolonists who did not have representation in the legislature, but it was the